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Latest Windows 10 Update Has Yet Another File-Managing Issue (gizmodo.com.au)
An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo:
When it was discovered earlier this month that the 1809 build of Windows 10 was deleting user files just because, Microsoft halted the update until the problem was fixed. Shame, then, that another not-as-bad-but-still-bad file overwriting bug has now reared its head. in 1809, overwriting files by extracting from an archive using File Explorer doesn't result in an overwrite prompt dialogue and also doesn't replace any files at all; it just fails silently. There are also some reports that it did overwrite items, but did so silently without asking.
Ars Technica speculates that there's a larger program with Microsoft's testing process: [M]any of the preview builds had a bug wherein deleting a directory that was synced to OneDrive crashed the machine. Not only was this bug integrated into the Windows code, it was allowed to ship to end users. This tells us some fundamental things about how Windows is being developed. Either tests do not exist at all for this code (and I've been told that yes, it's permitted to integrate code without tests, though I would hope this isn't the norm), or test failures are being regarded as acceptable, non-blocking issues, and developers are being allowed to integrate code that they know doesn't work properly...
Microsoft's new development process has, proportionately, a greater amount of time spent writing new features, and a reduced amount of time stabilizing and fixing those features. That would be fine if the quality of the features were higher to start with, with the testing infrastructure to support it and higher standards before new code was integrated. But the experience with Windows 10 thus far is that Microsoft hasn't developed the processes and systems needed to sustain this new approach.
Ars Technica speculates that there's a larger program with Microsoft's testing process: [M]any of the preview builds had a bug wherein deleting a directory that was synced to OneDrive crashed the machine. Not only was this bug integrated into the Windows code, it was allowed to ship to end users. This tells us some fundamental things about how Windows is being developed. Either tests do not exist at all for this code (and I've been told that yes, it's permitted to integrate code without tests, though I would hope this isn't the norm), or test failures are being regarded as acceptable, non-blocking issues, and developers are being allowed to integrate code that they know doesn't work properly...
Microsoft's new development process has, proportionately, a greater amount of time spent writing new features, and a reduced amount of time stabilizing and fixing those features. That would be fine if the quality of the features were higher to start with, with the testing infrastructure to support it and higher standards before new code was integrated. But the experience with Windows 10 thus far is that Microsoft hasn't developed the processes and systems needed to sustain this new approach.
Wow, that's Microsoft quality!
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
Windows exists in a weird temporal space between the total phasing out of personal computers for goys, and the old days of personal software.
Windows 10 will be the last version ever. That seems ridiculous if you assume it will last for decades, but the deprecation of personal computers is planned on a much shorter timescale.
Who cares that your local data gets turned into mulch. It will all just be appy app apps in the cloud soon.
cant do that on a phone.
[($)]
... computing. To turn PC's into locked down devices like phones. The masses are too stupid to understand what is happening and keep feeding all these companies money. Watching PC software freedom and games being literally stolen and turned into "services" because the average person on our planet is fucking chimp level intelligence is pretty fucking disgusting.
If you're implying the Dolphin was a humongous, mind-numbingly, horrendously stupid idea, I'm inclined to agree with you.
During the April update this year, I had 3 W10 installations to get through the process. None of them worked, although one in particular went spectacularly wrong and wiped out files on the system's hidden boot partition, basically resulting in the system attempting to reboot and crashing out. There was no choice left but to perform a clean installation, then let that fresh image update.
The broken process left all sorts of log and event files scattered across my SSD and I provided them to MS, who were unable to determine the cause.
The really interesting thing for me is that the image that ate itself happens to run on the same hardware as another W10 image. I have 2 licensed copies of Windows and I use a "drive bay" to swap different bootable drives in to the same hardware. So when I upgraded the "other" image on the same platform, I was surprised to see the upgrade generate a completely different set of errors.
The biggest configuration difference between these two builds is that I use one for gaming and one for office work. Although both had the latest nVidia drivers on board, the gaming build used nVidia desktop "Surround" to create a single workspace of 5760x1200, whilst the office build just treated the display space as 3 connected monitors.
The most frustrating thing is that the feedback I was getting from the triage team who helped me (they were all volunteers and they were all excellent) was that MS had been shipping code they knew to have multiple bugs and issues in it. The problem they were having in triage was that there were *so many* bugs, it was proving next to impossible to narrow down to a specific fault.
Nadella might have turned around Microsoft's economic slide into oblivion, but his governance of the technical robustness of his company's products is, sadly, non-existent. Worse for me, both of these W10 licenses were for new-build hardware; I had no older licenses that I could grandfather in, so I'm out of pocket over £400 and have 2 systems [one box] that I simply don't trust to work reliably when MS push updates. If it were a case of "free but buggy or purchased but robust", I'd take "purchased but robust" every time. What I've actually got is "purchased but buggy". The most offensive thing is: Microsoft's actions - their continued pushing of buggy code, when there are NO COMMERCIAL DRIVERS FOR DOING SO is just plain offensive.
I wish they would just stop. Produce zero new features until ALL the bugs are squashed.
There's a reason I'm writing this post whilst running Mint Linux - and it's because I'm not trusting Windows at the moment. If I don't need to go back to Windows, I won't. I have nothing but respect and admiration for the triage volunteers over there, but Microsoft the company really don't care. That stinks.
If you have to use Windows 10, use the LTSB version. No Windows Store, no Edge, no Cortana, no platform updates, security updates only with minimal telemetry.
Microsoft don't want you to know about LTSB and do their best to hide its existence, but it's really what Windows 10 Pro should have been.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
The end users are the people paying to place ads.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
When a company has a monopoly, this is what happens. They maximize their price and then, usually later, start cutting every corner possible to minimize cost.
And when it comes to programming projects, based on my long experience at the hands of managers at various companies, I'm sure I know at least part of what's contributing to this MS mess: There's a very long-running cultural bias among managers, particularly the less experienced ones, against spending resources on testing. I've seen this play out time and time again. An organization has a process in place that works reasonably well (and in some cases very well), and new managers are convinced that they can be much more aggressive, cut all that time and money "wasted" on testing, and then a quality shit storm like this MS debacle happens.
MS will learn a painful lesson, tighten up their procedures, and then when another idiot manager comes along it will happen all over again.
These problems have existed for well over 2 years now. Back in the beginning it was that files would appear again after having been deleted, or the trashcan not emptying.
Just a few months ago, one day after reinstalling Windows 10, all apps and programs installed in the last day disappeared, with no notice or any kind of error being reported.
These things shouldn't happen by themselves, so I suspect there's a lot more control under the hood for Microsoft, to literally remove, add, or edit your files or documents, and now a larger systemic issue makes this functionality fail and people see their files go missing.
If you are doing any kind of crucial or sensitive work, you would do well in consider switching away from Windows. Not just because files could go missing, but because of how seemingly Microsoft has access to your sensitive files.
At this point I sorta almost miss Ballmer all coked up out of his mind "Developers, Developers, Developers!"
In days past, while Microsoft still sucked, at least they were more predictable to the point where one could "deal with" and manage their shit. Seriously, it could be done.
Now it's all completely insane unpredictable chaos to the point where it's damn near impossible to manage their shit in any sort of professional manner, because we all are part of some fucked up beta testing appy app as a service experiment.
In conclusion, I believe we need more luddite developers who can do several lines of coke before coding, to make Windows development great again.
I've been running Win 8.1 with classic shell and I haven't had any of these problems, probably because they haven't produced a major update since I originally installed it. Guess I'll stick with it a bit longer. (Classic shell makes 8.1 a decent OS.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
It just makes me shudder to think how unimaginably horrible the Windows 10 code base must have become to let a grade school bug like that through to production. What the hell! Did they lather a bunch of cloud pollution on top of the local file APIs to the point where nobody can read or understand their code any more? And on top of that, roughly zero regression testing? Do any adults remain at Microsoft?
Needless to say, Linux will not do that to you. Something about the Unix philosophy.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I'd be concerned that nainstream status for Windows 8 ended on January 1, 2018. While you can get extended support for years longer, I'd not expect mainstream software releases to be thoroughly tested or necessarily compatible with it.
Surveillance capitalism doesn't care about the distinction between free and rented. They're going to grab your metadata anyway, because that's where the value is.
This is really an abstraction of a power relationship. You get data-harevested because you're just a dumb subject. The surveillance capitalists get to harvest you because FUCK YOU we're in charge.
I'd be concerned that nainstream status for Windows 8 ended on January 1, 2018. While you can get extended support for years longer, I'd not expect mainstream software releases to be thoroughly tested or necessarily compatible with it.
Not getting updates from Windows is a security plus.
Seriously, I have had more problems with machines being rendered malfunctioning, files deleted, drivers renamed on Windows 10 than I have had in my entire life.
Windows 10 updates are a worse virus than any blackhat virus.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Worst insult for a software developer: Wow, that's Microsoft quality!
Is it the 90s again? I used win2k/xp in the naughties, win7 for most of this decade, at work they're all Microsoft with Windows/Outlook/Office + SQL Server and honestly the code is quite okay. The big issues are usually design choices like UAC, the ribbon, UWP, telemetry, ads etc. though of course they can have a bad bug. So can Linux and open source. In fact most project except the kernel seem chronically understaffed and whenever there is a bad bug it turns out there's just a handful of volunteers making due or sometimes even just a one man band.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Either tests do not exist at all for this code (and I've been told that yes, it's permitted to integrate code without tests, though I would hope this isn't the norm), or test failures are being regarded as acceptable, non-blocking issues, and developers are being allowed to integrate code that they know doesn't work properly...
Third option: Microsoft has tests, but not one that would discover this particular issue. Failure to consider all possible test cases is not itself evidence that there aren't any tests, and it's not evidence that the company ships known failure cases.
reads to me like nothing has changed in their processes for more than 30 years.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
For reasons unknown, Windows in it's infinite wisdom, went through all of the audio drivers, and renamed them the with one of the driver's name, with a number appended to them. Then after deleting and reinstalling the drivers, continued to rename them incorrectly
The problem is so whacked that the company I bought the equipment and software from did a Teamviewer session with me to show how to fix the problem. Explaining would have taken all day.
Which I suspect is fixing it until the next update. In the meantime, I'm going through the computer to see what else they screwed up.
This is not a matter of running in VMs, or performing arcane tricks to disable updates.
This is a matter of a company so incompetent that their updates are an attack upon it's customers. Attacks so nasty that malicious virus writers must be in awe.
Where an old operating system like W7 is more secure because it doesn't get updates.
Meanwhile, I've switched everything except that one laptop to Linux or MacOS. Where any update that screws the OS will be the first.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
^ posting AC because during a copy of large amount of files Dolphin ate half of them including his slashdot info
No worries, one day europe will produce a piece of software people actually use.
You mean Linux?
This type of bugs only show that Windows OS is a spaghetti code, no matter how many pictures they draw with layers, blocks and modules, they don't follow these.The code is all over the place and touching something breaks something else which looks like unrelated.
Raid on the boot partition "just works", reliably no matter what, if you use mdadm --metadata=1.0 when you create it
What that does is put the raid metadata at the end of the device. Anything that isn't raid-aware (your bios) just sees a standard filesystem, and doesn't care about the other parititions or whatever else comes AFTER the filesystem. Once the kernel launches and starts mounting filesystems, it session the raid metadata and treats it as raid.
That works because the things that don't understand raid, such as your bios, only read the data, they don't write to it. Therefore there's no worries about writing the same thing to both copies. It's only written to after the raid is mounted.
If you test that out, check to see if both drives are marked as bootable in the partition table.
If both are already marked bootable, you're good to go.
If they aren't currently and you change that, making that change could change which drive ends up being called sda.
If they aren't currently both bootable and you do not mark the other one bootable, you'd need to do so if the bootable drive fails.
Windows 8.1 is not Windows 8! 8.1 is supported till January 2023.
Quote the parent comment: Microsoft's "... insane unpredictable chaos..."
The Microsoft chaos existed 10 years ago, but yes, the chaos is worse now. See this Scientific American article: Microsoft Vista voted tech world's top "Fiasco" (Feb. 26, 2009)
It's amazing that a company can be so badly managed that there is an article about it in Scientific American magazine.
A year before that article: Vista's 11 Pillars of Failure. (April 21, 2008)
Some of John C. Dvorak's complaints:
6) Bogus Vista-capable stickers.
7) Missing drivers.
8) Conflicting advice.
11) Performance. You're not supposed to deliver a new operating system that's been in development for more than four years yet performs worse than the previous OS.
A Slashdot comment I wrote 10 1/2 years ago: Microsoft: "The whole world is our beta tester." That comment was way too positive, I realize now. Part of that comment seems correct to me:
"Another problem at Microsoft is apparently that the good people have left, and the people who remain are not knowledgeable enough to do the work."
It's time to stop joking about the many, many problems at Microsoft. (Regarding the parent comment: Cocaine will not fix the problems.)
Microsoft needs a new CEO and a re-organization of management.
See my comment posted yesterday: Microsoft is poorly managed? Plenty of evidence.
A couple years ago, Microsoft made a big deal of laying off their QA team as they were to be replaced by automated testing. Now, I am a big fan of automated testing, but not as a replacement for qualified QA professionals. User acceptance testing and thinking outside the box are very difficult if not impossible to accomplish with only automated tests.
Windows 10 is not the only piece of software that Microsoft has been releasing of late with questionable quality. Microsoft Teams is a joke with massive UI design flaws that cause tremendous headaches for their users. Visual Studio 2017 has been riddled with bugs with their numerous releases, including one that made it impossible to view the result of your automated unit tests (the irony is thick here). They only just released the fix for that bug after introducing the problem two months ago, and with each patch, it seems new bugs are cropping up. Is anyone actually testing these releases? Yes. The customers are, which is a really poor way to ensure you have a quality product.
Microsoft needs to rethink their entire testing strategy, because their current approach simply is not working. What is even worse is that many people are lapping up the Microsoft dogma of software design while remaining ignorant of the actual results. I fear that a large sector of the software development scene is being polluted by their misguided ideas (much like the modern UI design elements, but I digress....)
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
Apple shipped hardware if you hold it wrong, the cell radio doesn't function.
Google shipped a web browser with a broken DNS resolver that would wait 60 seconds to timeout before resolving a DNS entry (imaging browsing the web at only 1 page per minute).
These are just some quick examples off the top of my head, but the list is extremely long. But Microsoft is getting a scalable unfair reputation in comparison to the other companies for fucking up just as bad.
Hell, I'm on a Google Pixel phone right now. The home screen can be swiped between multiple pages. 100% consistently, if I lock my phone on one particular page, when the phone unlocks, my entire home launcher disappears. I have to swipe over to a different arbitrary page, lock the phone again, and then re-unlock it just to get my launcher back.
Microsoft releases updates to a small amount of people first, not everyone. If issues are detected, they halt updates, fix them, and then reissue the updates once again. Google? Apple? Others? They just tell you to fuck off and deal with it. This launcher bug has persisted for at least two months now. I don't even know how long the DNS resolver bug in Chrome existed, it forced me to use a different browser and I've never gone back. For a company I consult for, they had an issue where Chrome broke the ability to print documents for several months with literally hundreds of complaints on their forums. Who still prints this day in age? Anyone who uses a web based point of sales system (virtually everyone that does POS) and needing to print customer receipts.
Okay, fine, what about open source software? Surely that is better tested, right? ... Remember that time one of the main devs of Linux left debug code enabled in the kernel and it actually shipped? Yeah, Linus went fucking NUTS. But that just goes to show that no matter what project or who is in charge or however much testing/review you have, shit happens.
"Either tests do not exist at all for this code (and I've been told that yes, it's permitted to integrate code without tests, though I would hope this isn't the norm)"
Oh my, so so so so much to unpack in that one sentence.
The fact that this bug got shipped should tell you a lot, and none of it's good.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
With the super block at the begining, you can't accidentally mount one component device rather than the array, therefore throwing the array out of sync. It's normally a mistake to do that, so it's good to make it not easy to do by accident. If you want to mount a filesystem that starts at an offset into the device, you have to do that *on purpose*. That's one reason it's not the default for mdadm.
For installation scripts, it's a good idea to do that on /boot only by default.
Leon Black would buy your forum in a leveraged buyout and then nuke your account